I’ve never been a girl except in the biological sense. I’m not a slight little thing with no muscle mass. I’ve got big, broad shoulders and the thighs of my farmer ancestors (from both Italy and Ireland). I think women’s shoes are ghastly, painful things, and women’s fashions are largely designed by gay men hell bent on expressing their vast depths of misogyny in the most unique way they can find. Don’t believe me? Then explain to me, please, why men’s fashions have trended to baggy and comfortable for the past thirty years while at the same time women’s fashions have trended toward the skin tight, flesh baring extremes we see today?
Needless to say, all of these things, and more I’m declining to mention here, combined with the fact that I never did learn just how to actually be a girl have made any of my various forays into the world of the feminine painful and slightly embarrassing.
I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo, and because I’m an incredibly deliberate person I’ve spent a good chunk of time in the past few weeks researching the symbols and images to which I’m attracted before I commit to a permanent inking. It was no surprise, then that most of the symbols that attract me have masculine implications.
One symbol that has always appealed to me is the dragon. The dragon comes in a lot of different forms.
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The Dictionary of Symbolism by Hans Biedermann says of dragons:
In myths of creation, dragons are usually violent, primeval creatures who must be defeated by the gods…In fairy-tales and legends, slaying the dragon is a frequent test of the hero’s mettle; if he succeeds, he will obtain a treasure or a free a captive princess. The dragon here is a symbol of the bestial element which must be defeated with strength and discipline….In contrast to this Occidental conception, the dragon is usually understood in East Asia as a symbol of happiness, capable of producing the potion of immortality. It represents the primal essence yang of Chinese philosophy.
This, quite naturally, leads us to what the Dictionary says about yin and yang:
Yin symbolizes femininity, north, cold, shadow, Earth, the passive, and dampness; yang, masculinity, the south, warmth, light, the heavens, the active, dryness, and the emperor.
I think that I’m just thinking too much about it. Being able to do has, for me, always required that I know how something works. Usually that involves breaking something down into its constitutent parts and figuring out how they work individually and together. This is usually a pretty good approach, and works well with most things. Not so with understanding the nature of gender and what our society dubs “masculine” and “feminine.”
As near as I can tell there is something alchemic, something that the person doing the perceiving adds as a result of genetics, social morays, experience, and preference when making judgements about masculinity and femininity. It’s more than having muscles or a hairy chest or shaving your legs and wearing dresses. It’s more than being aggressive about going after what you want (masculine) or maneuvering people into giving you what you want (feminine).
I guess what it boils down to is that I just need to concentrate on being me.